June 9, 2008

Please join us on Friday, June 13th at 11:00AM for an open house at the El Presidio of San Francisco. We will demonstrate the digital interpretive trail created by the University of California, Berkeley class, Digital Documentation and Representation in Archaeology. We will be walking around the footprint of the 1790 fort and visiting El Polin Springs, home of the famous Juana Briones. Come and experience San Francisco history at this unique technological event.

When: 11:00 AM

Where: The Officers’ Club at the San Francisco Presidio, 50 Moraga Avenue

The idea of this field-school has developed as a result of both the design charrette held in August 2007 by the archaeologists of the Presidio Trust to plan their research and public programs of the El Presidio (Spanish and Mexican) fort and the Presidio Trusts new plan for the Main Post including the Anza Esplanade. Ruth Tringham is a consultant on this project. In addition the UCB Dept of Anthropology is currently administering and sponsoring a large private grant (Shaw Foundation), which includes funding for the new Coordinator of Public Programs for the El Presidio (Levantar) project at the SF Presidio.

The course is on “New Media and Cultural Heritage” and focuses on the real world challenge of creating interpretive walks and other installations for the public that involve wireless technology, digital geomapping, storytelling etc, globally and, specifically, at the El Presidio fort and the de Anza trail (the Levantar Project), which is the current focus of research of the Archaeology Group at the SF Presidio. The course involves the design, field trial, and documentation of these different formats of representation of cultural heritage places. The aim is to seek alternatives to permanent markers of information about places, leveraging different forms of digital media. The course takes advantage of the many specialists in these technologies in the Bay Area with whom we have contact and who have offered to contribute their help to the course (CyArk, Cultural Heritage Imaging and others). It will also build on our own research in the Remediated Places project at Catalhöyük and the SF Presidio.

The Presidio Archaeology Lab created an amazing GIS overlay of Sal’s 1792 plan of the original San Francisco Presidio, triangulating the position from excavations performed by the many field schools over the years. Using the GIS overlay as a guide, I recreated the footprint of the 1792 Presidio Quad as a Memory Map in Flickr, accessible by mobile phones and geospatially located. This is a small part of a larger project of interpretation trails at the San Francisco Presidio, and it factors heavily into my dissertation on emplaced archaeological interpretation. Here’s a step-by-step guide to creating your own enhanced landscape.

1) Take a screenshot of the area you’d like to annotate. On Macs you can do this by typing command-shift-3.

2) Edit this image down to the desired size/location. I usually use photoshop and correct the satellite image for color.

3) Upload this image to Flickr. You can also use google earth for this same effect, but as of yet, you cannot access google earth from cellphones.

4) Add notes to the photo using Flickr’s toolbar. When someone moves their mouse over the photo, then the notes appear. This also works with touch-screen cell phones such as the iphone. Unfortunately you can only add rectangles, but that should work for Americanist archaeology, at least! You can also add links to other images inside of the note.

5) Add the photo to Flickr’s map. This gives you a (very) rough lat/long that will allow other people to locate your interpreted data.

6) Embed your photo into your blog/website with Mbedr. Unfortunately I’ve been having problems with this on wordpress–for an example, check out this post on livejournal. Using Mbedr preserves your flickr notes outside of flickr.

7) You should now be able to access the image on your cellphone, with the notes intact. This also works on the One Laptop Per Child laptops, which delights me to no end.

May 24, 2008

Welcome to the Remixing El Presidio blog. We will be updating this blog with news from our class at the San Francisco Presidio. Here is the class description:

The idea of this field-school has developed as a result of both the design charrette held in August 2007 by the archaeologists of the Presidio Trust to plan their research and public programs of the El Presidio (Spanish and Mexican) fort and the Presidio Trusts new plan for the Main Post including the Anza Esplanade. Ruth Tringham is a consultant on this project. In addition the UCB Dept of Anthropology is currently administering and sponsoring a large private grant (Shaw Foundation), which includes funding for the new Coordinator of Public Programs for the El Presidio (Levantar) project at the SF Presidio.

The course will be on “New Media and Cultural Heritage” and will focus on the real world challenge of creating interpretive walks and other installations for the public that involve wireless technology, digital geomapping, storytelling etc, globally and, specifically, at the El Presidio fort and the de Anza trail (the Levantar Project), which is the current focus of research of the Archaeology Group at the SF Presidio. The course will involve the design, field trial, and documentation of these different formats of representation of cultural heritage places. The aim is to seek alternatives to permanent markers of information about places, leveraging different forms of digital media. The course will take advantage of the many specialists in these technologies in the Bay Area with whom we have contact and who have offered to contribute their help to the course (CyArk, Cultural Heritage Imaging and others). It will also build on our own research in the Remediated Places project at Catalhöyük and the SF Presidio.